"I should briefly mention Google buying the Deja News archive, promising to revitalise Usenet, and then promptly abandoning it. Cheers Google. Choogle."
Oh wow, I totally forgot about that. I remember it being a really big deal at the time, and now I barely even remember.
Here, Google pulled one from the Microsoft playbook: embrace, extend, extinguish.
Google bought DejaNews, rebranded it into Google Groups (embrace) and then proceed to Googlify it, making it less and less Usenet-y and more and more Google specific (extend), until only the Google-specific mailing lists remained (extinguish).
Google was pretty much considered the "good guys" back then. It only started with AdWords a year earlier and was barely breaking even at the time. Loong way from "corporate overlords".
It certainly smacks of being someone's promo project where they moved on to other things after the migration and the project fizzled out without leadership.
Oh wow, that still exists! What a sparse and abysmal end.
I wonder if they even know it's still there? Probably doesn't use enough bandwidth for anyone to notice. Probably just a few people taking a trip down memory lane to re-read things posted 10-20 years ago.
